“Time has a way of making you behave !”, David Gilmour reminds me when recounting performing as a guest with Roger Waters in 2011 at London’s O2 Arena, but it could just as easily have been said by the surviving Pink Floyd alumni Nick Mason or Roger Waters, all of whom rejoin me for the first of our two-part peek behind The Wall and its definitive “Immersion” 7-disc box set. For instance, Roger Waters admitted to me that in 1980 Pink Floyd had been guaranteed one million dollars per night to perform The Wall on a stadium tour. “And I refused to do it outdoors,” Waters tells me in this classic rock interview. “But how can you do a show, that’s about the alienation you feel about doing stadium shows, in a stadium?”

Apparently Waters reconciled that personal dilemma, as evidenced by his multi-year globetrotting tour leading into the 35th anniversary of The Wall‘s release, the fourth highest-selling in the world as well as a shining critical success. This is part one.- Redbeard